Phones abaolutely do listen, but not to audio via the mic. When Apple and Google tell you they respect your privacy, they mean they don’t harvest data directly from a live feed of the mic nor camera; they still scan your files in some cases, and they harvest your browsing history, and read your text messages metadata, and check your youtube watch history, and scan your contacts, and check your location, and harvest hundreds of other litttle tiny data points that don’t seem like much but add up to a big profile of you and your behavior and psyche.

So your friend was at a pub quiz with a couple dozen other people, and his phone knew where he was and who was nearby. A statistically significant portion of the people there were not privacy conscious and googled “Lord of the Rings runtime” or something similar. All that data got harvested by Google and Apple, and processed, and then the most recent and fitting entry from some master list of customers’ sites’ articles was pushed to all their newsfeeds.

Humans don’t understand intuitively how much information is being processed through nonverbal means at any given time, and that’s the disconnect large companies exploit when they say misleading things like “noooo, your phone isn’t listening to you.”

But it’s totally not privacy invasive, because at no point along the line did a human view your data (/s)

there’s actually aword for this type of mixed idiom: malaphor

Wait, how does that work? It seems like it should take the same energy to melt it either way.

presumably they mean using something besides your body heat to melt it

That’s more of an turn-of-phrase, no?

Is that a Mark Fischer quote?

“Take the Blue Pill and the gradual slide into fascism stops accelerating for four years while the current hellscape becomes the status quo, take the Red Pill and buckle the fuck up as we hyperspeed into fascism”

That interface is called a manual or tutorial, and there are many better ones than neural networks

AI isn’t stupid because it doesn’t possess any intelligence to begin with, the term “AI” is just a marketing misnomer.

Language Models are essentially really advanced Markov Chain generators. Once you understand that, you’ll realize why your question is like “I keep asking these water mills to make me a cup of coffee, but they all taste like dirt”: wrong tool for the job, it just happens to be tangentially related.

You’re also asking if there’s a way to precisely word a request so that the computer will do what you want it to do. Luckily for you, there is! It’s a trick that’s been around for ~60 years and it’s called “programming languages”

none, and gods willing that will always be the case. Civil war isn’t just “good guys vs bad guys”—hell, it wasn’t even that the first time around, despite union propaganda trying to make it seem like their intentions were pure. War is also starvation and loss of access to clean drinking water and constant blackouts as supply chains get interrupted; it’s many people dependent on uninterrupted health care dying off because they can’t get their meds or do their testing; it’s r*pists and pedophiles and nazis and sociopaths having their way with others while society gets distracted; it’s your loved ones dying, not because they were fighting for what’s right, but because they were “acceptable losses”; it’s constant anguish that destroys lives for multiple generations as trauma gets handed down like an heirloom.

Living through a war is about the most extreme form of hate I could imagine wishing upon someone. If someone who lived through one is willing to say “it’s time,” then I’m willing to listen. Otherwise, please excuse me if I don’t.

rights are won with your life, everything else is a privilege that daddy (government) allows you to have

out of curiosity, how many wars have you been caught in the middle of?

On the Caveat Emptor (“Let the buyer beware”) side of things, I look at other metrics well before I rely on stars.

How many contributors does it have? How many active forks? How many pull requests? How many issues are open and how many get solved and how often and how lively are the discussions? When was the last merge? How active is the maintainer?

Stars might as well be facebook likes imo: when used as intended, they didn’t say much more than “this is what the majority of people like” (surprise, I’m on lemmy bc I have other priorities than what’s popular), now they mean nothing at all.

Just a reminder: Animal Agriculture is the leading cause of Zoonoses (PDF: The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture)

Eat a plant based diet to limit pandemics!

They are updating their Platforms program policies

You can read the current version, archived here

And here’s the proposed changes

I haven’t read it all, but some glaring changes stand out in regards to fingerprinting (no longer prohibited) and device unique identifiers (no longer prohibited from gathering). Basically, Google wants to become even more lax with how users are tracked by their advertising partners

Because I believe in learning from the past, and not making information forbidden either formally via regulations, nor informally via social pressures.

This reminds me of a manifesto I was reading for a proposed proletarian-run state. Comes from early 1900s, before the world went to shit because of the rise of fadcism. Particularly a few key points from their 25-point plan stood out to me:

11. Abolition of unearned incomes [passive income, in today’s terms]. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.

12. In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice of life and property that each war demands of the people, personal enrichment due to a war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. Therefore, we demand ruthless confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies (trusts).

14. We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.

15. We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.

16. We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.

17. We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of land rent and prevention of all speculation in land.

18. We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.

[…]

20. The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious citizen to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. […] We demand the education at the expense of the state of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.

21. The state is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, […]

Oops, wait, that’s excerpted from The National Socialist Program

Yeah, it turns out Nazis have always been willing to use socialist rhetoric to appeal to the working class. They know what they’re doing, but it’s only a matter of time before what’s determined to be for “the good of the workers” is coincidentally aligned with genocide and war and the greed of the ruling class…

TL;DR Nazis were always on board with taxing the rich… Until they didn’t have any more competition, at which point it’s back to oligarchy (and genocide, lots and lots of genocide).

he’s talking about The Jews

1. “There are monsters.” Not just the services themselves, but real sick people who want nothing more than to hurt others; whether for financial gain or purely for pleasure makes no difference to how it affects you.

2. Services owning your data isn’t the endgame. It doesn’t get locked in an inaccessible vault as much as they want to make it seem that way. Ownership is just the beginning.

2a. Here’s a list of websites who have had users’ data hacked.

2b. Sometimes companies get bought out, or go under, or just need a little extra cash on the side. And that’s when the users’ data turns into a financial asset that gets sold to the highest bidder. And usually that bidder is just a data broker who sells it to other companies for advertising or for more brokering… And on it goes down the chain until it’s either being sold by people who aren’t vetting their customers and are selling it for very cheap; or one of the many links in the chain gets hacked. Either way it all gets back to point 1.

3. Yes, services are highly likely to report users. There’s no requirement, legally, unless it pertains to a specific investigation, but tech companies in the US famously love to comply with law enforcement and the NSA and the DOD and DHS and really any other agency that asks. Many other governments love to be as nosey about what their citizens do online

4. It’s not just about what’s illegal, it’s also about what could be made illegal. If that sounds paranoid, try asking women in states that have made abortion a felony why the won’t use period tracking apps. Or ask trans people in Texas why they won’t share personally identifying information online. Hell, a month ago “Deny, Defend, Depose” was little more than a nonsense phrase, now it’s enough to get you thrown in jail for threats to commit terrorism; what posts are you willing to have taken out of context and combed for phrases the next domestic terrorist used in their manifesto?

I guess that’s my biggest issue: what you don’t know can harm you, so why is the default action to lay back and let the rest of the internet do whatever they want with your personal information? Why is the question “why should I care what they do” and not “why do they want it so badly”?

That’s a very poor way of comparing wealth. For example, the difference between $1,000 and $1,000,000,000 is also about a billion, but $1,000 is 0.0001% of $1,000,000,000 while $1,000,000 is %0.1

Buying power is not linear in today’s world, either; at best, it’s logarithmic. Because the law of diminishing returns is a thing, you can sink as much labor (and value) into goods and services as you want, and the quality will eventually reach an asymptote: it will approach perfection, but never get there. This means that in general, the difference between what millionaires and billionaires can afford is measured in quantity and not quality: billionaires can afford 100 yachts or one megayacht, but millionaires can still afford one of those near perfect yachts. Billionaires can afford many mansions, millionaires can still afford at least one. The millionaires have more in common with the billionaires than they do the average incomers ($60,000/yr in the USA). I make 3/4 of the average income, but I’d be lucky to afford a used jetski, much less anything resembling a yacht.

Put another way, in a society where everyone’s a millionaire, the richest possible billionaire is 1,000,000 times more wealthy than the poorest possible person, and the average billionaire is only 1,000 times more wealthy than the average millionaire. Whereas right now, they are infinitely more wealthy than the poorest person, and the poorest possible billionaire is still 17,000 times more wealthy than the average person in the US.

So what I was originally getting at is that the mere fact of billionaires existing can only approach some semblance of morality in a society where their wealth doesn’t put them on an entirely different plane of existence from the poorest people.

I have no problems with billionaires, in a society where everyone’s a millionaire.

A society that allows for such wealth disparity to happen is deeply corrupt. Anyone who not only participates in that society, but voluntarily becomes the cause of such disparity is irreparably morally bankrupt. They are a burden on society, contributing millions of times less than what they take.